


the lines we will cross

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Affairs, Angst, Developing Relationship, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Hurt/Comfort, Secret Relationship, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:04:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5140793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coulson and Daisy navigate a secret relationship, jealousy, and lines they know they can't cross.</p><p>(Basically the "what if Coulson and Daisy were hooking up throughout what we've seen of season 3" kind of fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the lines we will cross

"Will you stop it with that first name stuff?"

" _Will you_?"

She doesn't want to kiss him while she's angry at him. They do not do that. They have kissed when they are sad, frustrated, bitter, and angry at themselves. Never at each other. It would feel like breaking a rule.

"You sound..."

"Jealous?"

"I wasn't going to say that," Coulson says, on the defensive.

"Well, it's not that."

"I know."

We don't do that, she thinks.

 

+

 

It was a convergence of things, how it started.

In a way it was the fact that they were, literally, the only people left in the place.

The first couple of months were the worst. Simmons gone and most of the team's resources allocated on following every real or imagined lead. May on vacation until it became obvious it was more than that. Bobbi going through multiple operations and Hunter never leaving her side. Mack having to deal with all day to day details. Fitz gone on wild goose chases most of the time.

There wasn’t anything dramatic or special to it.

It wasn’t the day she saw her father for probably the last time.

It wasn’t the day she cut her hair.

It wasn't the day she told Coulson she wanted to change her name to Daisy, it wasn't the slight twist in his mouth, how he tried it out softly, the first time he called her "Daisy" and how he forgot the second time.

It wasn’t the moment she started to realize what she had done, dropping the crystals to the sea, what she had started, all the pain and destruction that would be born out of her gesture.

But of course everything accumulated on her shoulders, until one day she felt her muscles too clamped to move.

It was the second Inhuman they had failed to get to in time.

“I’m just tired of this,” she said, when it was just her and Coulson and a two-person debrief on the couch.

“I know.”

She knew Coulson was worried about what it meant, that Inhumans were being snatched in front of their eyes. That there was someone out there hunting them, hunting people like her. 

“Waking up every day, thinking, is May ever going to come back, is there even a point in hoping Simmons does, will Fitz and Hunter ever be available to help us with this. The cases keep increasing in rate and it’s just me and Mack.”

“I’m here too, or at least I’m trying.”

She tilted her head, giving him a sympathetic smile.

“Yeah, but you have everything to worry about, I get that.”

“I want to be involved, it’s important to me.”

“I get that too,” her smile got broader. “Don’t mind me I’m just exhausted and grumpy and…”

She massaged her shoulder, feeling the solid knots there.

“Everything all right?” Coulson asked.

“Just, you know, stress.”

He reached out and touched her shoulder, slowly digging his fingers, giving her the time to get away from under his touch before he started massaging. She felt like no one had touched her in months (she remembered her mother grabbing her to try to kill her, her father hugging her to say goodbye), it felt shocking.

In that moment she knew what was about to happen. She lifted her gaze to Coulson. They both knew. It wasn’t really about them, their relationship. It was about her cramped muscles, and both of them feeling impotent. At least this was something they could fix, and _immediately_. At least they could make each other feel better, for a while. It wasn’t about their relationship, at all, but it was about them being friends who wanted to help each other. She realized Coulson was the only person in the world she could do this with and not be overwhelmed by the expectations.

So she let him kiss her right there on the couch and she kissed him back, telling him to take her to his room before someone came in - knowing no one was going to come in, knowing they were alone and stranded with the weight of what was happening in the world. What they had started.

He was perfect afterwards, which is what she would remember the most, more than the fact that he had been a great lover (even though she had no complains about the way he had unknotted her whole body with patient hands, impatient kisses).

“Feeling better?” he asked while she dressed slowly, massaging her shoulder again. “Any of that actually helped?”

She smiled at him. “It did, thanks. And you?”

Because she didn’t want him to have done this just for her, she wanted him to take something from it too. She knew he was just as stressed as she was, maybe worse. He had lost things too. She knew, just by looking at his shoulders that he must ache just as much. 

“Me too,” Coulson nodded slowly, making her feel better all over again.

 

+

 

Coulson, he just kept waiting for the guilt to start.

After the second time - as quiet, as anxiety-fuelled, as disjointed as the first time, except this time it was in her quarters, which he had never seen before and was fascinated by - and after the third time he started wondering if something was wrong with him, and he just kept for the guilt to finally hit him.

But he was too busy. Too stressed like Skye said. And Skye wasn’t Skye anymore, she was Daisy, and he had the feeling she didn’t want to talk about that. And it was easier to give her what she wanted than actually ask.

She understood why she wanted this, with him, why she might even _need_ it right now. But he kept waiting to feel like he was using her, anyway.

He had his own reasons for wanting a distraction.

One morning they were getting coffee together in the kitchen (they did most things together at the time, missions, strategies, meals, commiserating, sex didn’t feel like much of a change in those days) and he forgot for a moment that his newly implanted prosthetic hand didn’t have the agility of her old one (which he could still feel, most of the time) and the mug slipped from his useless metal fingers, spilling hot coffee all over his groin like in an unfunny joke.

Skye didn’t think it was funny either. She reacted to his litany of pathetic swearing by quickly applying paper napkins to the area and making sure he was all right.

The whole thing was embarrassing, mortifying.

She took the broken pieces of the mug and left them on the counter.

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up,” she said.

Next he found himself standing only in his shirt in the middle of his room, Skye still asking if he had burnt himself and drying his leg with a towel from his bathroom. She wasn’t about to ask how he felt. Coulson clenched his fists a moment - in one of them he could feel the fingernails digging into the palm, in the other he could feel nothing. The shiver of impotence went through his body, cold. Skye kissed him and swallowed his rage that morning.

He wondered if they were using _each other_. But they had always been good at supporting each other, in any way. This is just another iteration. As long as he didn’t make it something that wasn’t. As long as he didn’t wish for it to be something it could never be.

(she would later think about it every time he struggled with pouring his coffee - now using mugs that weren’t his - she would watch him get better and steadier every time and twist his face with the dubious satisfaction of such a small, embarrassing victory, and Daisy would think about how he had been that morning, how he pressed her against his mattress in silence and buried himself like he hadn’t done before and wouldn’t do since and she would remember him breathing heavily against her neck and how the top of his thigh was still damp from the spilled coffee when he rolled his hips into her body)

 

+

 

He would probably not believe her because he was like fifty but Daisy thought Coulson was a pretty great catch, as sex-only affairs went.

Not that she knew anything about those. That was the other thing. She felt out of her depth here: she had never had sex with anyone for any reason other than because she was stupidly in love with them. This was new for her. She didn’t know how to go around it and it worried that she didn’t know what Coulson was getting out of it - except for the sex itself, but she knew Coulson, no matter how lonely he felt he wasn’t the kind of guy to go to bed with just anyone.

She liked the closeness, of course she did. And they had started becoming close even before the first night they slept together.

She started feeling a bit more relaxed around Coulson once they started having sex. The veneer of professionalism would have felt wrong to keep up. In a way it made them more equals, just like her leading her own team did. She dared to question him more, look him in the eye more, laugh with him more. She felt freer to stare him down in his own office (a space that had been sacred and daunting before), once that she knew what it felt to be pressed against his desk, with his fingers wonderfully wrapped around her hip and his mouth hot and wet against her ear as he fucked her from behind. She also felt like she was allowed to insinuate herself into his personal life a little bit more.

“A new one,” she pointed at the clearly improved hand.

“Yes, my second one.”

“You weren’t expecting that, uh?”

“I thought that as soon as I put on my robot hand… well, I thought I’d forget I had lost mine in the first place.”

She touched his arm comfortingly.

“Is it more stable?” she asked, remembering the coffee incident.

“I think so. I was thinking about trying it on the shooting range,” Coulson told her. “Do you want to see me embarrass myself like a recruit?”

He was trying very hard to make it sound like something unimportant - and she could totally relate - but obviously it was tearing him from inside and he was joking through the fear. It meant a lot that he would ask her to be his witness. But she didn’t feel like it was unearned, and maybe spending some time looking at each other naked helped with that too.

She joked back. “Sounds like a plan, but only if I can bring snacks.”

 

+

 

He thought, once, vaguely, about telling Andrew when Andrew pressed for a session (Coulson didn’t want any more of those, just friendly chats where no one was taking mental aor literal notes) about his hand, about everything, about pressing Skye too hard - which Coulson knew Andrew believed he was doing, as if Skye wasn’t very capable of pressing herself too hard and most he could aspire to be in an enabler. An enabler was bad enough, Andrew was right.

To borrow the terminology Coulson started to think if they were enabling each other.

He thought about telling Andrew and it wasn’t the risk of being judged what stop him, but the idea that Andrew might advise them to stop.

 

+

 

"Skye."

"Why can't you get it right?" 

She was biting at his throat, pressing him against the wall, fucking her on her own bed.

"Sorry, I'm sorry," he said. "It's strange of you to be so pushy."

She wasn't mad at him or disappointed – she was anxious to become Daisy Johnson. Who once had a family. Who had a legacy. Who had a name and a place in the world. She needed to change and quickly and she didn't want reminders like Coulson's inability to get her new name right.

 

+

 

“I noticed that you have stopped wearing ties for good,” she commented, while he slid his mouth down her neck to the open collar of her top, taking a break from helping her with inventory in the armoury. She told him he had lost a bet and Coulson figured the reign of terror of Mack lived on - he also figured they wouldn’t be disturbed here for hours.

“I got tired of spending that much time _trying_ to tie them,” he said, gritting his teeth, another morning’s frustration coming back to him. He didn’t want to feel like that anymore so he took steps to stop feeling like that. It was just some stupid ties, anyway.

Skye - Daisy didn’t ask if he wanted to talk about it. She helped him undo the rest of the buttons and guided his head - fingers scratching gently across his skull - to her stomach, where he dropped distracting kisses until Daisy’s fingers curled around the tablet where she was entering the numbers.

 

+

 

The rest of the time is like nothing really happened.

They kept teasing each other and with the absence of everyone else they became even closer. With Skye - Daisy taking on all this new responsibility the old boundaries were disappearing. Coulson liked that but it also made him nervous, the old him who just went with the flow felt itchy at the idea of changes. Big, gradual changes.

What they did at night (and sometimes in the middle of the day) did not affect the other parts of their relationship. 

At some point it becomes very much like therapy - because neither are fans of the real thing.

The trick was to not let it be about them, about their relationship. The trick was not to make it a solution when they were locked in an argument, and the trick was not making it into a _reward_ whenever one did something good for the other.

So Daisy mostly bit her tongue whenever she was about to say something important in the context of or right before or right after.

Only one time she slipped, remembering what had brought her to his bed in the first place tonight.

“I need you on the ground next time,” she told him. “We need to find out who’s getting to the Inhumans before we do.”

They were sitting on his bed, both naked. This was the part where she normally started to dress, where she got out. It was also the part that she felt more guilty about liking, the right afterwards, where it was almost like she was sleeping over at some friend’s, a pajama party with Coulson. She wasn’t sure he’d like that expression.

“On the ground? You mean on surveillance,” he followed.

“Mack and I have our hands full, we need backup.”

She caught him touching her knee under the covers distractedly while he listened to her. She smiled to herself. Just because this had nothing to do with a relationship - this is _a means to an end_ \- it didn’t mean there was no tenderness or caresses.

“You want me to spy on this group,” he said.

“Aren’t you a spy, Phil?” she replied, only the second time she had tried his first name during those months, but she liked the reactions she was getting.

“Yeah, but this is more up your alley,” he teased back.

Something in his voice - like he was excited again. They had never had sex twice on the same night, that would be new. Daisy slid her arms under the sheets, running her hands over his chest, checking, and yes, when she dropped her fingers she found him half hard again and smiling at her.

“Well, if you are a good boy maybe I’ll teach you a couple of Rising Tide tricks,” she told him.

 

+

 

It wasn’t usual that he was the one to come to her - he didn’t know why he did that, maybe it gave him some illusion of control over this, but it was just that, an illusion - but it happened sometimes.

Daisy - yes, Daisy, he was _decided_ to get it right - had kept bleeding from her nose intermittently during the whole plane ride back home and though the doctors had cleared her he still wanted to check up on her. He wasn’t coming for sex, but was willing to offer if she needed it, because he felt like she might need it.

“The headache has become almost tolerable, so yay, progress,” she said, making room on her bed for him to sit.

“Still, progress.”

Only now he realized how scared he had been when she passed out. Only know he let himself realize. Why he had come here, to make sure she was okay after all. Damnit, Fitz, he thinks. He is grateful to have Simmons back but the cost could have been entirely too high. He stared at Daisy, her nose reddened from wiping it clean over and over, and he knew the cost had been too high already.

She twisted his hand into the fabric of his jacket.

“That was very gentlemanly of you,” she commented. “Putting your jacket under my head like that. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

He chuckles, feeling relieved for the first time in months.

“You have very low standards when it comes to chivalry.”

Daisy - Daisy Daisy Daisy, keep remembering it, Phil - agreed, joking. “I have very low standards. I’ve had a very gentleman-less upbringing.”

They let their laughter die out gradually. 

“Did you need anything else?” he asked in the end, touching her shoulder, not smooth as he had wanted to be.

She caught up immediately and Coulson swore he could see her blush a bit.

“No, it’s okay, I just really want to lie down,” she said, not meeting his eyes at first. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

He really hoped she didn’t honestly believed he’d mind.

He tried to give her his gentlest sweetest smile (muscles that had gone a bit rusty before Skye - Daisy came into his life) just in case she had any doubt (and remembered that her having doubts wasn’t a judgement on him, he remembered what she was used to) and then he kissed her cheek.

“ _Of course_ I don’t mind,” he said, getting up. “Just rest.”

 

+

 

The night after she almost got caught by ATCU, after she kissed Lincoln, after the argument with Coulson, that’s when things started getting messy, she could go and pinpoint that precise moment.

"I wasn't expecting–" he started, genuinely surprised, but Daisy stopped him with a kiss.

It was unusual that she came to his quarters.

"Mack just gave me a beating at his stupid videogame," she said. "I'm a sore loser."

“I know,” he muttered against her lips and then her teeth. “I know you are a sore loser.”

So she decided she wasn’t going to lose.

 

+

 

They didn't talk about it outside their moments together, they still don't.

It's mostly business as usual.

It's just this thing they do.

Because it helps.

And so here they are.

“Will you stop it with the first name basis?”

“ _Will you_?”

He has her grabbed by the arm, pressed against the wall in a corner of the hallway they _know_ they can’t be seen. He doesn’t know what to do with her jealousy, doesn’t know if he has the right to call it that, torn between thinking she’s being unfair and regretting that he has somehow accidentally hurt her.

She twists herself free of his grip but it’s only so that she can grab him by the shirt and pull him further into the complicit shadows of the base.

 

+

 

“Are you angry?”

Daisy doesn’t answer. When she pushes him Coulson falls back against his desk with a painful thud. She doesn’t care.

“Daisy please talk to me.”

“So now you care about what I have to say?”

This is new. They have never been like this. This heat, and for the first time the frustration comes from within, it’s not something they can fix with sex, because this time it is _about them_.

“It was strategic,” Coulson says, singing the same song.

She pushes her body against his, dropping her hand to palm him through his pants. He’s not hard yet but she is going to fix that in a moment.

“I didn’t mean to - “ he keeps excusing his actions.

“You didn’t mean to ignore my advice?” she finishes.

“Sk- Daisy.”

“You listen to her. Why don’t you listen to me?” she says, gritting her teeth as she unbuckles his belt.

“Is this what it takes for you to listen?”

She slips her hand under his boxers and wraps it around his cock, squeezing hard.

“Is this strategic enough for you?” she asks in an ugly voice, stroking him hard and fast.

“Please, don’t do this,” he pleads.

She’s never seen him this scared.

“You’re going to get us all into trouble. You know that?”

“I know,” he says, pressing his fingers against her chin and kissing her.

The anger goes out. She starts stroking him slowly now. He’s not hurting her on purpose. He could never hurt her on purpose. She kisses him back softly, telling him it’s okay, over and over until he stops trembling with fear.

 

+

 

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You are not the one who should be sorry here.”

He is doing his belt with some difficulty - a constant reminder he can’t quite escape - while Daisy draws her fingers across the back of his neck.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she repeats.

Coulson remembers this woman doesn’t have a cruel or petty bone in her body, so she doesn’t understand that her reaction was quite natural.

“It didn’t end too badly,” he tells her, gesturing towards the state of their clothes, smiling at her.

She laughs and hugs him. “No, it didn’t.”

Coulson holds her back, tight, so tight. Tighter than he has let himself since they started sleeping together, because he was afraid it would seem suspect. They had a life, a job to do, before this. Now they lines are not quite as clear as when it was only comfort sex to shake some stress off their shoulders.

“I’m sorry about today, I shouldn’t have pushed you aside like that,” he tells her, feeling his own face damp against her hair.

“I know you’re trying to protect me,” Daisy replies. “Even if you are doing a crappy job of it.”

“Yeah, a crappy job, _thanks_.”

He laughs against her neck, neither of them letting go, neither loosening the grip on the other.

 

+

 

Coulson probably doesn’t understand it’s not jealousy. It couldn’t be.

Dragon Lady isn’t the problem, or that he flirts with her - which he totally does, by the way, and his protests frustrate her - or even if he were to fall in love with someone or start a relationship.

That’s not it.

Daisy has always known, deep down, that she was meant to lose Coulson. She’s not wired to believe otherwise. She doesn’t know how she’ll lose him, just that it will happen sometime, so she just looks for signs. Is ATCU and this woman the cause? She doesn’t know. She just knows it will come someday and she’d better be ready.

 

+

 

Only once they are about to get caught, one night when Mack needs her and can’t find her anywhere.

Daisy gets dressed as Coulson covers for her, spinning some lie about her going outside for a moment and how he probably just crossed paths without noticing.

“I’m sorry,” Coulson says, when Mack is gone, massaging the back of her neck tenderly because he knows she hates lies.

She shakes her head, buttoning up. “Have you done this often?” she teases.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a very good liar, I’m impressed.”

Coulson frowns and she guesses it’s not exactly a compliment.

She leaves quickly, the only trace a quick kiss on his cheek.

 

+

 

She should probably have said this before they walked into Coulson’s room together tonight.

“Hey, if you want to stop. We can stop.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, when he is about to take off his other shoe. He looks a bit ridiculous like this.

“I know you had a date with the Dragon Lady.”

“Can you stop -? It wasn’t a date, it was a professional lunch.”

He would be so defensive if it wasn’t a date. Or maybe he’s being defensive because she’s being aggressive, at this point Daisy can’t really tell.

She’s finding saying this harder than she thought. Maybe she doesn’t want to lose this - this is convenient. The person she cares the most about in the world who also happens to give her really great orgasms when she’s feeling down. Of course no one would enjoy losing that.

“I know we don’t talk about this and I really don’t want to talk about it, ever. But. I might not approve of your particular choice of companion, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get in the way.”

Coulson gives her an amused look. She gets it - getting in the way seems to be exactly what she’s trying to do with ATCU, since the beginning.

“That’s not what’s happening,” he assures her.

 

+

 

He doesn’t want her to go on, this weird idea that she is getting in the way of something. It’s making him uncomfortable. It’s making him feel guilty, dirty, disloyal. He wants to go back to undressing and not talking about it. Because he knows the moment they start talking about it Daisy is going to realize and make it stop. He knows he will lose this, eventually, but he’s not about to precipitate it himself.

“I don’t want to be an obstacle for the thing you really want to do. You don’t - you don’t owe me loyalty,” she explains - keeps explaining - with her head dropped.

“I could say the same to you,” Coulson tells her.

He thinks it’s only fair.

He doesn’t want to be in the way either, and he has been selfish for not bringing it up. He knows Daisy is lonely, too lonely, and he should be helping get out of there, not locking her in.

She pulls back, resting against the headboard. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not an idiot, I can put two and two together.”

“Lincoln…” she mutters. “It’s not what you think.”

“You don’t have to explain. You know that. Don’t you?”

“It’s complicated. He’s…”

“ _Like you_?”

She nods.

She starts undressing again, slipping her shirt off her shoulders while holding his gaze almost defiantly.

Coulson is not naive. From the moment she changed he always knew he couldn’t give everything to Daisy, be everything for her. And he accepted that because the alternative would have made him feel too selfish.

It feels a bit selfish not to tell her to stop.

 

+

 

“What’s the point of having backup if they are not going to back you up?” she keeps complaining as Coulson pulls her out of her top, brushes his fingers across the dark awful bruises on her lower back. Daisy knows he would have preferred if she had stayed in medbay - to appease his own guilt no doubt - but she is fine, really.

She is not surprised that the ACTU left her out to dry, just surprised it hurts so much. She had let herself trust them, just a tiny bit. Maybe she had wanted to trust them, for Coulson, and to prove him something, perhaps.

“I’m sorry, I sent you in thinking they would have your back,” he repeats, sounding horrified at himself, at what he did. “This shouldn’t have happened.”

“It’s okay, I know you didn’t think this was going to happen.”

He lies her gently on his bed and starts pulling her pants off.

“I imagined by this time I would have heard a couple of _I told you so_ from you,” he points out.

“I’m being magnanimous,” she teases, feeling the edge of pain ebb away as Coulson tickles her legs, massaging the back of her knee.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, pressing his lips against the inside of her thigh, where there are some bruises too, though they don’t hurt half as much as the one on her back.

“You got betrayed too,” she points out, wanting to touch his hair, his sad self-recriminating face, but too sore to move except to slide down the pillow and rest his legs over Coulson’s shoulders.

He has this “relax and let me do this” expression now and his mouth is refreshing against the sore heat of her body. He starts eating her out slowly and Daisy feels like she is sinking into the mattress, and it’s the softest thing she’s ever felt.

She looks around her. She has come to associate Coulson’s quarters with good feelings, with almost-happiness and other lame stuff she should know better than to believe it. But she’s always happy here, she always feels good when she’s with him like this. She would think she loves him except that in her experience love is not this nice and this good and this happy. She falls asleep thinking it must be something else, not love.

 

+

 

“Sorry, I really didn’t mean to crash here,” Daisy says, opening her eyes tentatively but not moving any other muscle yet.

“It’s okay,” he says as softly as he can, checking the injuries on her back. “You’re in recovery.”

She turns her face on the pillow, making a string of wonderfully warm sounds as she wakes up and stretches on his bed. In all these months she had never slept over, they had never actually spend the whole night together. Coulson feels tempted to tell her it’s his favorite thing of all that’s happened between them, waking up next to her, to the feel of her breasts pressed to his back and her arm comfortably wrapped around his waist. But Daisy probably wouldn’t care for his delusions of domesticity, it’s not why she is here in the first place.

He stops himself from touching her too much, giving himself away, so he rests his gloved hand, friendly, on her arm.

“Hey, I snuck in some coffee, in case you didn’t feel like moving yet,” he tells her, almost embarrassed by his own gesture.

“Yesplease,” Daisy mutters enthusiastically into the pillow.

He brings her the mug as she sits up among the bedsheets. Her hair is a mess and she looks like the painkillers haven’t done her any good. She doesn’t look attractive at all except for the part where Coulson finds her completely irresistible right now.

She takes the coffee, wrapping her other hand around Coulson’s wrist as he holds the mug, his left hand, like she’s feeling the stability of it like one would feel the pulse of a real hand.

 

+

 

The only reason they resolve things is because they are forced to.

The only reason they face the fact that this is, after all, a thing to be resolved.

The lights go out not long after they realize Ward has infiltrated the compound (courtesy of someone in ATCU selling their location, and if they survive this day she is going to have so many _I told you so_ s prepared for Coulson).

They are the first to get to the armoury in the dark - and she hopes they others are just slow and not incapacitated - when the red lights of the backup generator come on.

This is a bad idea, she thinks.

Not taking all the guns they can against Hydra, no, that’s a good idea. The other one - the one that has been in her mind like a virus these last few minutes, since her stomach dropped at the thought of _we might all get killed today_.

“I think we have to talk,” she says, while she helps Coulson put on the bulletproof vest.

“ _Now_?”

At least he doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, his alarmed tone says as much.

“Well, yeah, now, before Ward blow us up from here to next Tuesday.”

“That’s why I would rather not do this here,” he says, pulling away once the straps of the vest are done, retrieving his gun at once. “Because I know how these things go. If we talk then it’s likely that one of us -”

The rest of what he is going to say gets swallowed up by the explosion.

 

+

 

He really wishes he had let Daisy say what she was going to say, instead of the way she’s just repeating his name over and over now, but it all sounds like he’s underwater, and maybe what she was going to say it’s not what he wanted to hear - maybe she was going to tell him they should stop this - but he still wishes he had gotten to hear it.

 

+

 

She gets bored of playing bedside angst soon.

She gets bored of nurses giving her hate faces, so she goes exploring vending machines - she hoards good stuff for when Coulson wakes up - and when the rest of the team leaves because there’s still a lot of work to do and Coulson is completely out of danger (just blissfully drugged for the foreseeable future) Daisy dedicates her time to scan government channels for any leaks of their location (they are outlaws again, ATCU made sure of that). She doesn’t like being here, so in public, but the Playground got totalled, med equipment included.

He just needs some rest.

She still feel bit of a creep, despite trying to keep occupied otherwise, spending so many hours basically just watching him as he sleeps, watching his resting face. Or half of it, anyway, because the other half is still covered in bandages.

That’s the first thing he realizes when he finally wakes up two and a half days later he went down. He touches the side of his face and winces.

“Yeah, you almost got your pretty face blown away,” she tells him.

Coulson turns his head, noticing her presence. It takes a bit to sink in, it takes him a bit to remember what happened.

“The base?” he asks after a while.

“That’s the bad news. We’re going to have to retile the bathrooms.”

She can’t help but smile at his general aliveness, she wants to tell him right now. They got interrupted before.

“And Ward?” he asks, too.

“May took him down.”

This time he frowns. “Damn, I can’t believe I missed that.”

“It was pretty kickass, definitely in my Top Ten favorite things that have ever happened.”

He nods, relieved, and takes a big breath, closing his eyes and resting his head against the pillow.

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” she asks.

“No, of course not.”

He opens his eyes again. Daisy is really glad he gets to keep his pretty face, though the bruising might leave some permanent marks. She doesn't care. It hits her, that he's alive and he didn't die and she gets to do this now.

“What is it?” he asks, noticing her expression. “Daisy?”

She almost misses him calling her Skye. She should tell him later.

"I know it's a big cliche to say this by the guy's hospital bed but..." she drops her gaze. “We have a conversation to finish.”

He turns to her. The bandages cover one corner of his mouth but she thinks he’s smiling at her.

“You’re relentless,” he tells her.

Daisy moves his chair closer. Since she’s already doing the cliche she decides to go for broke, taking his hand in hers. His arm is dotted with tiny scars from scratches, the kind that don’t hurt anymore.

“Daisy?” he asks, confused, but letting her squeeze her fingers around his palm.

She looks up again.

“It’s about the thing,” she says, super eloquent. She can’t believe she used to have a podcast.

“I figured.”

“The thing is I had never had sex with anyone for any reason other than because I was stupidly in love with them,” she says, searching Coulson’s eyes. “And I still haven’t…”

She grimaces at him, like pleading for a soft blow if the answer is not what she’s looking for. Coulson just keeps staring at her and taking a little too long to answer for her sanity.

“Come on, Coulson. What do you think? What are you feeling? You should know better than to let me go on with one of my rants.”

He looks at her really seriously.

“I think that if you don’t know what I’m feeling then you were right, I’m a very good liar,” he says.

Can't he just tell her he loves her? Why does he have to make everything so complicated?

“That’s a good answer, right? That’s the good one?”

Coulson just stares again but now Daisy doesn’t need translation, not with the way he’s looking at her.

Funny, she just now realizes he’s been looking at her like this the whole time.

"And I don't care if you flirt with people,” she tells him. “Even with obviously evil ladies. That's fine. You flirt. I don't care. I just... I guess I'm not very good at compartmentalizing, uh?"

He pulls his hand free of her grip and reaches out to her, pressing his palm against Daisy’s cheek.

"Welcome to the club."

His hand is warm.


End file.
